Investing Research Articles

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 5/10/21 through 5/14/21. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to your investing needs. Subscribers: To receive these weekly digests via email, click here to sign up for our mailing list.

Will equity funds “managed” by artificial intelligence (AI) outperform human investors? To investigate, we consider the performance of AI Powered Equity ETF (AIEQ), which “seeks long-term capital appreciation within risk constraints commensurate with broad market US equity indices.” Per the offeror, the EquBot model supporting AIEQ: “…leverages IBM’s Watson AI to conduct an objective, fundamental… Keep Reading

Does the conventional wisdom to “Sell in May” (and “Buy in November”, hence also the term “Halloween Effect”) work over the long run, perhaps due to biological/psychological effects of seasons (Seasonal Affective Disorder)? To check, we turn to the long run dataset of Robert Shiller. This data set includes monthly levels of the S&P Composite… Keep Reading

Is buy-the-dip (BTD) a reliably attractive stock market timing approach? In their April 2021 paper entitled “Buy the Dip”, Thomas Shohfi and Majeed Simaan devise and test various BTD strategies as applied to SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY), as follows: BTD with Lump Sum – 54 variations in which the investor progressively allocates a… Keep Reading

How can retirees estimate whether their investment strategy will sustain all the withdrawals they expect to make in retirement? In his February 2021 paper entitled “The Sustainability of (Global) Withdrawal Strategies”, Javier Estrada  presents two tools to monitor retirement plans for early signs of trouble: One evaluates sustainability of an existing withdrawal strategy. The other… Keep Reading

A subscriber asked which exchange-traded fund (ETF) asset class proxies make the best safe havens for the U.S. stock market as proxied by the S&P 500 Index. To investigate, we test 14 ETFs as potential safe havens: Utilities Select Sector SPDR (XLU) iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond (TLT) iShares 7-10 Year Treasury Bond (IEF) iShares… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 5/3/21 through 5/7/21. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to your investing needs. Subscribers: To receive these weekly digests via email, click here to sign up for our mailing list.

…formal asset valuation models (extrapolations of historical return data) provide the most (least) predictive estimates of the future equity risk premium.

A subscriber suggested review of the “SPY-TLT Universal Investment Strategy”, which each day allocates 100% of funds to SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) and/or iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond (TLT) with SPY-TLT allocations equal to that with the best risk-adjusted daily performance over the past few months. There are 11 SPY-TLT allocation percentage choices: 100-0, 90-10,… Keep Reading

Each month, the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) each month generates the Services Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), aggregating monthly inputs from purchasing and supply executives in services firms across the U.S. regarding business activity, new orders, employment and supplier deliveries. ISM releases Services PMI for a month on the third business day of the following… Keep Reading